20 oct 2003: babyart.org bought and registered by me with godaddy for three years with automatic renewal - locked and mine forever - or so i believed

02 dec 2005: without any prior notice my site disappears replaced by a godaddy advertisement - the whois shows my domain now registered to a russian address - within a couple of hours this changes to mustafa kurt (carl-severing-str 14, breman 28329 germany - a fake address?) and his own sham page occupies babyart.org (suspiciously quickly? - anyone who's started a web site knows at the very minimum it takes a day for everything to be set up) - a questioning email sent to mustafa kurt resulted in the following extortion letter:

Hello trevor,
this domain name was legally buyed at auction.
you can buy it from me, if you want.
price will be in tenth thousands, so make an offerm if you want...

i take my complaint to godaddy who tell me the domain is not registered with them and they are unable to locate any previous registration for the domain in question by me - basically cleaning their hands of the whole issue and telling me to go elsewhere - i point them in the direction of the whois showing them as the registrants and myself as the rightful original owner - and suddenly, without any apology, they deem to acknowledge me but state the domain expired in october - again i point them at the whois showing it doesn't expire till october 2006 - this they choose to ignore and, making things up as they go along, say they sent me several renewal notices (nothing ever received from this company) and the reason it didn't auto-renew is because of the expired credit card that is on file (another lie)

altho abbreviated to a couple of sentences here it's actually taken countless letters to get this far and by now the pattern of complete uncaring concern for me, shirking of any responsibility, refusal to admit any fault whatsoever and endless blatant lying has driven me to infuriated exasperation - i give in, it's obvious i am going to get nowhere with this bunch of crooks, my domain is lost, so i tell them to go have sexual relations with themselves - a typical robotic standard response comes back:

Please note that this is a professional forum. All correspondence must be kept at a professional level. We will not tolerate profanity. If you continue to use profane language, we will consider this issue closed. Please let us know if we can help you in any other way...

i professionally don't answer - godaddy destroyed my business, i have no more need of their 'help' thank you very much - and i know from experience this is not worth the trouble of fighting - after the illegitimate deaths of babyart.nu, my wife's hippiecoco.com and now babyart.org i've resigned to the fact the internet domain business is hostile and corrupt and i want nothing more to do with it

17 jan 2006: an apparently genuine site "the art of parenting" now resides at babyart.org - a baby art visitor goes to the trouble of researching evidence (as if needed) that the site is a sham to make it appear that the domain isn't still being cybersquatted - articles on the fake site stolen verbatim from other sources on the net - all of which carrying copyright notices conveniently omitted on babyart.org of course - the russian hackers will doubtless argue copyright laws from elsewhere in the world do not apply to them - nevertheless evil godaddy still happily pocket their dirty money in fees and are still culpable for aiding and abetting cybercriminals who poach sites and demand ransom for their release (furthermore, as the extortion letter was forwarded to them, they are explicitly guilty of doing this knowingly and refusing to act in any way!